Trust Your Brain: 5 Scientific Tips For The Perfect First Date

Authors of new book "Brain Trust" explain how body language, voice and conversation affect a date.

Your profiles match. You've moved slowly into a promising online friendship. And now it's time to bring a book and rose to the coffee shop for your first official date. These five scientific tips from the book Brain Trust can help it go smoothly.

First, according to social psychologists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick of Northwestern and Texas A&M universities, make sure you arrive before your date. They used speed dating to show that the sex that sits and waits is more liked than the sex that rotates from person to person.

It's due to a concept called embodied cognition — a much-studied form of subconscious crossover between actions and thoughts. For example, a study found that people rate Chinese characters "more attractive" when they pull these characters towards themselves than they did when pushing the same characters away. In dating, it means you like things you approach — like someone already sitting at a coffee shop table.